Benchmark a junior mining company against automatically detected peers on market cap per ounce, price to NAV, grade, AISC and financing history — because a valuation only means something relative to something else.
Enter a company name or ID above and we will automatically find similar peers for a side-by-side comparison across key valuation metrics.
No junior mining company is cheap or expensive in isolation. A market capitalisation of $40 million tells you nothing until you know what it buys — how many ounces, at what grade, in which country, at what stage of development. The only way that figure becomes meaningful is alongside companies that are broadly comparable.
Assembling that comparison by hand is the tedious part of the work. It means finding companies with similar deposits, pulling resource figures out of technical reports, and normalising everything to a per-ounce basis before the numbers can even be lined up.
This tool does that automatically. Give it a company and it identifies a peer group, then lays out the valuation multiples, grade, cost figures and financing history side by side — so the question becomes why a gap exists rather than whether one does.
Market cap per contained ounce is what the market is paying for each ounce in the ground. Lower looks cheaper, but the number is meaningless without context: an inferred ounce in a difficult jurisdiction genuinely should trade at a fraction of a permitted ounce in a stable one.
P/NAV compares the market capitalisation against the after-tax net present value from the company's own technical study. Below 1.0 means the market values the company at less than its study says the project is worth. Developers with completed studies commonly trade well below 1.0, reflecting the risk that the study's assumptions do not survive contact with reality.
Grade is the clearest single indicator of deposit quality, because it drives everything downstream — strip ratio, processing cost, and whether marginal ounces are economic at a lower metal price.
AISC, all-in sustaining cost per ounce, is what it costs to produce an ounce including sustaining capital. The gap between AISC and the metal price is the margin, and it is what determines survival in a downturn.
Financing history shows how much capital each company has consumed to reach its current position. Two companies with identical resources but very different funding histories are not equivalent.
You are not looking for the lowest multiple. You are looking for a gap you can explain — and then for evidence that the explanation is wrong.
A company trading at half its peer group's market cap per ounce is either mispriced or correctly priced for a reason you have not found yet. The reason is usually one of a short list: jurisdiction risk, metallurgy that does not work, a resource dominated by the inferred category, no route to permitting, a capital structure loaded with overhang, or management with a history of destroying value. Work through that list before concluding the market is wrong.
The most reliable use is the opposite direction. When a company trades at a large premium to comparable peers, the market is pricing in something — usually a discovery, a takeover, or a permitting milestone. Identifying what, and judging whether it is likely, is often easier than finding a bargain nobody else has noticed.
Ounces are not fungible. Before drawing conclusions from a per-ounce figure, check the resource category split — see inferred vs indicated vs measured for why an inferred ounce and a measured ounce should not carry the same price.
Peers are detected automatically from the company's flagship project: companies sharing its primary commodity and listed on the same exchange. You can override the group and specify companies manually, which is worth doing whenever the automatic set looks wrong.
Resource figures, grades, NPV, IRR and AISC come from filed NI 43-101 technical reports. Financing totals come from the company's announced raises.
The limits worth knowing:
There is no absolute figure, because the range across stages is enormous. An early explorer with an inferred resource in a difficult jurisdiction may trade at a few dollars per ounce, while a permitted developer in a stable one trades at many times that. The number only becomes useful against a peer group at a similar stage — which is what this tool assembles.
No, and this is worth knowing before you use it. The figure is market capitalisation divided by contained ounces; cash and debt are not netted out. A company that has just closed a large financing will therefore look more expensive than a true enterprise value calculation would show, and a company carrying debt will look cheaper.
That the market is valuing the company at less than the net present value its own technical study assigns to the project. This is common rather than exceptional among developers, because it reflects the real risk that the study's assumptions on metal price, capital cost, permitting and timeline do not hold. A very low P/NAV is a prompt to find out which assumption the market disbelieves.
Automatically, from the flagship project's primary commodity and the company's exchange. It is a reasonable first pass but a blunt one — it takes no account of development stage or jurisdiction, so it may group an early explorer with a permitted developer. You can override the group and choose companies yourself, and it is worth doing whenever the automatic set looks unlike the company you are studying.
Usually for a reason worth finding before concluding it is mispriced. The common explanations are jurisdiction risk, metallurgy that does not work, a resource weighted towards the inferred category, no clear permitting route, heavy warrant or share overhang, or a management record of dilution. Occasionally the market really has missed something, but that should be the conclusion after checking the list, not before.